The gravel road

A local guest blogger shares her real-life encounter with the supernatural, as part of the '500 Words' writing challenge. February's theme is 'A Scary Moment.'

The most spine-tingling event of my life....Where do I start?

Was it the house I lived in, aged 12, that was filled with nocturnal activities, not quite of this world? There was one time when my shadow box fell off the wall. Blown glass ornaments crashed to the floor and the only piece that miraculously stayed intact was an angel in a bottle.

Was it the moment when our TV - the heavy, old-fashioned type that takes two people to lift it - moved forward five inches?

Or perhaps it was the time that I went blackberrying for mum's pie, down the gravel road where the best berries grew. Carefully feeling my way into the bush, braving the prickles to pluck the juiciest fruit, I was about to grab a fist-full when an almighty guttural, deep-throated growl came out of the bushes. I jumped back so fast, the berries went flying. I can still feel the panic in my chest. In hindsight, it could have been a wombat - but it was an unearthly sound I'd never heard before. I scraped up those gravelly berries so fast and I was off, rear end way in front of me. I never did get all that grit out of the berries before mum cooked that pie.

But none of these events compared to the one I'm about to describe.

I returned to the same gravel track, one mile from said wombat experience. In the opposite direction, my four siblings and I caught the school bus. Mum used to pick us up after school but on this particular day she was late, so we started to walk home on our own.

We were walking along, kicking dirt, chucking rocks, chatting away. We looked up to the horizon of the gravel road and could see our driveway in the distance, and mum's car coming towards us. That's when we saw it. All of us saw it - five pairs of perfectly good eyes saw it. Our jaws dropped, eyes popped. Out of the bushes on the horizon, where not thirty seconds before mum's car had been, there was a figure. A human-shaped form. It stood as high as the trees. Standing, feet apart, as tall as those trees.

We screamed, we yelled for mum to look behind her but being in the car, she couldn't hear us. When mum arrived, we all screamed over each other and tried to tell her what we'd seen. The figure stepped away, back into the bushes. We never saw that figure again and I never went blackberrying again.

To this day, if I were to travel down that road alone, my tail would definitely be in front of me.